The Bodyguard ("Steps" story #91)

STEPS
by Michael Kroetch

The bodyguard’s mother is back on the street outside the hat shop walking fast back to the law office and counting, as she always does, how many steps it takes. The clicking off of numbers is so deeply entrenched in her experience of mobility that she barely recognizes she’s doing it. But she does know it’s happening and can usually spout her precise count at any point in a journey—even those few jaunts she’s made to the dwelling place of the man from whom she buys her laundry detergent. Twenty-three stairs up to his floor of the old apartment complex, with the third and eighteenth ones squeaking much more than they need to.

Not that she is thinking about that man. Or his disheveled home with all its crooked smells and any of what happened there between them in the kitchen—or rather, the place he calls a kitchen, but which is really just a battered Coleman cook stove beside a 50-gallon propane tank with a water jug duct-taped to its side. She isn’t thinking about any of that. Nor the ponies. She is not that kind of person. She is someone who knows how many times it takes to crank the manual pencil sharpener on her desk to achieve a perfect point. She prefers the manual sharpener and has told her superiors so stringently and often enough now that the subject is happily not broached anymore. By anyone. Such silence may be a little victory, perhaps, but it’s one she wears proudly on her shoulder now as she makes her way through the crowded sidewalk.

She can’t believe these people are allowed to go free in the streets. If it was her world, one thing would be certain—they’d all have to take a bath. And lickity-split about it, too. No dawdling allowed! No way. Which is a topic she keeps wanting to mention to the secret policeman. He has some serious issues to deal with in that area. But she knows it is going to be a tricky conversation to navigate as she’s heard that in Poland, until quite recently, it was against the law to have a bath tub. She heard it on one of her radio talkshows. She’d wanted to call up and ask for more useful facts about Poland, but was afraid someone might recognize her voice, and then somehow put two and two together and get a number that was not one she wanted to hear. That kind of number would certainly throw a monkey wrench at her and make her lose track of everything. Which is absolutely NOT what is needed, because right now she needs all the help she can get to simply keep up with her feet.